These Beijing Olympics Send a Much Darker Message
The first time China hosted the Olympics, it was a moment of hope and promise. The 2008 Summer Games in Beijing proved to be a coming-out party for an emergent China—rich, influential, technologically advanced, and, most of all, more and more open to the outside. Sure, the Communist regime’s human-rights abuses led to protests then, as they are doing now. But the international community set aside such differences to participate in what the Olympics are meant to be: a celebration of global sport and fellowship. China was joining the world, and the world welcomed it.
The latest Beijing Olympics, which begin on Friday, tell a darker story. With the coronavirus pandemic still rampaging around the planet, Beijing has understandably had to cordon off the Winter Games from the world. The few incoming travelers allowed, mainly those participating in the events, are being enclosed in a bubble, their interactions with the rest of the country limited by a blizzard of restrictions.
Nevertheless, the controls feel symbolic of China’s new attitude toward the world: tense, fearful, even domineering. The China of 2022 is not the China of 2008, and the Olympics are making that all too clear.
[Read: The Olympics have lost their appeal]
In 2008, the Summer Games appeared to be opening a window on an optimistic future, one in which China was a partner with the United States in an integrated global community. Here was a Communist to protest Beijing’s ill treatment of Tibetans. But that didn’t stop then-President George W. Bush from attending the Games and with China’s top leader at the time, Hu Jintao. China, as the Olympics seemed to highlight, was moving in the “right” direction: toward a more liberal society.
